Policy narratives, when they link problems and solutions, inherently rely on causal logic: because a caused b, therefore c is the necessary reform. Policy stories and the politics that surround them generate alternative and often contradictory solutions. John Dewey (1938/1977) warned of this habit among school reformers stating, “Mankind likes to think in terms of extreme opposites. It is given to formulating its beliefs in terms of Either-Ors, between which it recognizes no intermediate possibilities” (p. 17). And in fact, we note an Either-Or tendency at the heart of most writing about goals and politics in urban schools: either the way urban schools look and function is determined by structural inequalities in the society in which they’re nestled, or urban schools are the result of individual micro-level actors and actions. Stated another way, within the broad field of urban educational research, a picture emerges that either urban schools result from conditions beyond educators’ control (fix the society for the schools to follow), or urban schools result solely from those things that educators do within them (address educators’ pedagogical, curricular, and organizational incompetence, and urban schools will succeed).
In this chapter, our underlying argument is Deweyian and posits that in the field of education, the embrace of theory/policy/practice “either-or” explanations is both prevalent and problematic. Either-ors are attractive analytically, yet they oversimplify, and in oversimplifying they limit both researchers’ and practitioners’ thinking and work towards improving the schools we care about.
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Flessa, J., Ketelle, D. (2007). Persuasive, Pervasive, and Limiting: How Causal Explanations Shape Urban Educational Research and Practice. In: Pink, W.T., Noblit, G.W. (eds) International Handbook of Urban Education. Springer International Handbooks of Education, vol 19. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-5199-9_42
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